April 2005
Insulin-producing cells from brain cursors
In a paper in this month's freely-available online global health journal PLoS Medicine Seung Kim and colleagues from Stanford University suggest that one way of producing insulin-secreting pancreatic islet cells for future possible treatment of type I diabetes is to look beyond immature pancreatic cells and embryonic stem cells to other early cell types. Kim and colleagues took cells derived from brain which usually mature into neural cells, and exposed them to a series of signals that are known to drive pancreatic islet development. They were able to produce clusters of insulin-producing cells that responded to glucose out of the body.
When the cells were then transplanted into immunocompromised mice the cells could also be stimulated by glucose to produce human insulin. Future work will need to establish the long-term stability and safety of these cells and to work out how to scale up such a process to produce the much larger numbers of cells that would be needed for human treatment. However, the authors conclude that this technique "could serve as the basis for developing replacement islets from a wide range of human stem cells, including neural stem cells and ES cells."
Citation: Hori Y, Gu X, Xie X, Kim SK (2005) Differentiation of insulin-producing cells from human neural progenitor cells. PLoS Med 2(4): e103.
CONTACT:
Seung Kim
Stanford University
B300 Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine
279 Campus Drive
Stanford, CA USA 94305-5329
+1-650-723-6230
+1-650-725-7739 (fax)
[email protected]
PLEASE MENTION PLoS MEDICINE (www.plosmedicine.org) AS THE SOURCE FOR THESE ARTICLES. THANK YOU.
All works published in PLoS Medicine are open access. Everything is immediately available without cost to anyone, anywhere - to read, download, redistribute, include in databases, and otherwise use - subject only to the condition that the original authorship is properly attributed. Copyright is retained by the authors. The Public Library of Science uses the Creative Commons Attribution License.